Blizzard Support has World of Warcraft Windows and OS X system requirements that are updated in anticipation of the upcoming Cataclysm expansion for Blizzard's MMORPG (thanks Ant via IncGamers). Word is: "In preparation for the launch of World of Warcraft: Cataclysm, we have updated our recommended minimum system requirements. These new requirements correspond with patch 4.0.1. We suggest players check out our related support article for all of the details to ensure your gameplay experience is as ideal as possible." The new specs follow.

Intel Pentium 4 1.3 GHz or AMD Athlon XP 1500
1GB or more of RAM
NVIDIA® GeForce® FX or ATI Radeon™ 9500 video card or better
DirectX-compatible sound card or motherboard sound capability
25 GB free hard drive space
A keyboard and mouse are required. Input devices other than a mouse and keyboard are not supported
You must have an active broadband Internet connection to play

Mac OS X 10.5.8, 10.6.4, or newer:

Intel Core Duo processor
2 GB RAM
25 GB free hard drive space
A keyboard and mouse are required. Input devices other than a mouse and keyboard are not supported.
You must have an active broadband Internet connection to play

A full list of all supported (and unsupported) video hardware can be found on our Video Compatibility page. If you are running below any of these requirements, then you may encounter graphical issues, crashes, or slow down which we will be unable to address or troubleshoot.

*Note: Due to potential programming changes, the Minimum System Requirements for this game may change over time.

Post CommentEnter the details of the comment
you'd like to post in the boxes below and click the button at
the bottom of the form.

Linksil wrote on Oct 21, 2010, 13:54:Yea the wow installer is horrible. You need double or more free space to the size of your game for the install. You download 6 gigs of patches, then they copy the whole game while overwriting the old one. Don't know why they can't just patch one file at a time and need oh say 10mb free space?

Ya that update process completely killed my attempt at applying patch 4.01. Instead I had to uninstall the game and reinstall it using the new launcher / updater (found under a sub menu of your Battlenet account page, i.e. Full Game Install).

My assumption is that everyone should have the new launcher / updater now, so adding Cataclysm should be a "streamed" process rather than a downloaded patch update (assuming you purchase the online version).

BTW since I did a complete reinstall using the new launcher / updater, my WoW folder uses only 21.8 GB of space.